The business model of many companies on the Internet mostly depends on the display of advertisements on a client web browser. The rise of solutions enabling the blocking or skipping of such ads greatly endangers this mainstream source of revenue.
Advertisements represent a major source of revenue for many websites and companies. In the case where ads are massively rejected (and even “well targeted”, effective or informative ads of major companies), there won't be free content or services anymore. For now, only the most technically proficient users are aware of such adblocking techniques but a default integration of such tools in mass-market web browsers would result in huge losses for companies whose business model rely on advertisement. It is then of the highest importance to be able to find a way to secure the display of advertisements on web browsers and to avoid the possible death of advertising in today's digital networks and their associated ever growing adblocking capabilities. Indeed, a complete shift away from advertising threatens, with the growing use of adblocking techniques (so called adblockers or ad blockers).
Advertisements are text areas, still images, animated images, or even videos embedded in web pages. When a member of the advertising audience (referred to as a “viewer” or “user” without loss of generality) selects one of these ads by clicking on it, embedded hypertext links typically direct the viewer to the advertiser's Web site (“click-through” process).
It appears that more and more consumers are tired of intrusive marketing. They are saturated by highly distracting ads, though some industry players try to leverage “non-annoying” and “informative” ads. Indeed, there are very few simple, easy to read, non-intrusive, text advertisements. Instead, ads are often flash or animated gif banners that users feel to be too invasive (pop-ups, pop-unders, and the like sometimes cover the desirable content) and flashing graphics make it very hard to read real text elsewhere on the page. Most of the time ads that are delivered are not appropriate (so-called targeted ads often fail), since they distract the reader with noise. Further, the targeting of users implies to track habits and threatens privacy.
For these and other reasons, more and more users use so-called adblockers (or ad blockers). From a users' point of view, adblocking benefits include cleaner looking web pages, lower resource-usage (bandwidth) and the loading of pages is said to be speeded-up (many pages are designed to load heavy ads first). The state of the art comprises many adblocking techniques enabling the skipping or removing of advertisements on web browsers, such as pure text browsers, pop-up blockers (or pop-under), blacklists of URLs of ad servers, text filtering tools (based on keywords, to prevent ad files from loading), script blockers, use of CSS rules (to hide specific HTML and XHTML elements), etc.
Adblocking techniques are not solely involved. The use of extraction techniques for building personalized web pages, the use of RSS, and the use of mashups also induce advertisements' skipping. The use of personalized web pages enables the extraction of precise content areas and the gathering of the extracted content in personalized pages. Following such extraction, the user does not need to visit the original page again, thus skipping advertisements if any.
Another technique relies on loading entire pages and displaying them only with frames and/or <DIV> tags, hiding unwanted content. This last possibility also presents the drawback to leave the number of unique visitors unchanged (from the advertiser's point of view), though content is not displayed to the user.
With RSS feeds (RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication”), similar mechanisms do operate. Indeed, the rise of RSS feeds has deeply changed the nature of the Internet, which isn't anymore a stock of data but flows of data. It is important to notice that according to this RSS model, content providers do control feeds, meaning they can choose what content to offer to theirs subscribers, through RSS feeds. Again, thanks to emerging mechanisms, it is now possible for users to freely extract parts of web content, without any limitations. In other words, web users do not need to visit bottleneck pages anymore (home pages or portals containing lots of ads). In this context, content providers may be reduced to providers of raw data, with very few choices for monetizing their business. For example, a technique (sometimes called RSS Generator) enables the extraction of feeds from any web page. Yet other techniques allow not only the gathering of RSS feeds, but also the combining of feeds (RSS Remixer tools enable filtering, searching, mixing, etc). There have been some attempts to embed targeted ads into syndicated feeds (an ad would be served in an RSS item or blog post containing keywords that an advertiser has pre-selected) but text filtering (keywords-based—or involving other techniques) can bring this to defeat too. At last, the use of so-called mashups also poses a threat to online advertising. Thanks to APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), applications themselves can also be aggregated. And in particular, advertisements can be removed during the remixing of contents.
On the reverse side (i.e., secure display of advertisements), it appears that there are very few technical solutions available. A known approach consists in URL address scrambling techniques, in order to bypass URL blacklists. This solution is not efficient because of the reactivity of possible collaborative filtering (like peer-based anti-spam techniques). The use of randomized addresses also induces limitations (learning capabilities). Aside from this common technical approach, there are only non-technical methods. For example, permission marketing methods are tested (indeed, users may target ads instead of ads targeting users), but these methods do not apply well to mass markets. Other methods based on user profiling have been tried by advertisers or their partners to deliver better perceived forms of advertisements, but it poses privacy threats.
If no reliable solution emerges to secure the display of advertisements, advertising formats may evolve to these contextual, interactive, permission-based and targeted messaging to retain consumer's attention and to help minimize both irritation and “tuning out.” A few content or service providers also try to warn their users on damages implied by the use of adblocking techniques by arguing that it takes revenue out of the people that work hard to provide them content and services. Sometimes they require a specific license agreement for visiting their websites. In conclusion, none of these (non-technical) methods succeed to effectively act as countermeasures to adblocking techniques and/or the use of RSS feeds and/or the use of personalized web pages, and in fine, to secure revenues streams.